I just completed this bright blue, yellow, and white gem of a sauna situated on a red deck. The color was the client’s choice; he wanted something that would brighten things up and be in stark contrast with the usual suspects of taupe, dull brown, and moldy blues that afflict his neighborhood and so many other American housing developments. Why are builders so afraid of color?
The use of bright color in homes is often associated with places like seaside Baltic towns and Reykjavíc, Iceland—and for good reason. In the deep of winter these places are plunged into darkness as the sun hovers near the horizon or barely makes an appearance at all. Battling the winter blues makes the use of bright colors almost mandatory. Of course these places all have saunas (or in the case of Reykjavíc, massive public hot springs), another way to survive the depth of winter. I learned when I was an artist-in-residence in Nova Scotia that fishermen traditionally used bright colors in their houses simply because it was a way to use left-over boat paint. Boats are painted brightly so they can be uniquely identified at sea, so in a way, the house colors express something unique about the individuals who live within. Now, of course, the brightly colored fishing village is almost a tourist mandate.
Looking back on recent sauna projects, I see a shifting trend in color choices made by my clients: from authentic dark-brown Viking tar to blue-grey, then brighter reds and blues and greens, and now this latest color feast. There is also a trend in current design to use more bright colors such as on the eye-popping florescent orange running shoes I saw in the gym yesterday. I have been following the designer Ingrid Fetell Lee. She writes about creating joy with color in her book The Aesthetics of Joy. She is persuasive about using more color for the simple reason that it creates joy. Although I teach color theory, I have a tendency to stick to blacks, grays, and low intensity colors in my art, a trend that I have been trying to evolve out of. Perhaps I can take some cues from my clients and take some color risks in my own work. This latest sauna project actually makes me think of late Mondrian paintings such as Broadway Boogie Woogie in which he reduced his palette to the three primary colors and sought to use color as the basis for expression.
In this latest sauna project my interest in sauna and art actually converged. The warm interior heats your body, and the colorful exterior warms your spirit. Thanks, Karl!
I just completed a large 9’x12′ sauna at Silverlaken Glampground near Letchworth State Park. The glampground is an ideal setting for quiet retreats or group gatherings: a main lodge in a historic cottage, private cabins and luxury tents next to sparkling Silver Lake just miles from one of the most popular state parks in New York. The sauna is the perfect centerpiece for small or large gatherings. A group sauna is different from a small intimate home sauna; it creates a unique social situation where you can commune with strangers and make new friends all while stripped bare of the trappings of social status, class, or superficiality. It can be a perfect setting for friends to solemnly celebrate life’s important moments: a reunion, a wedding, a men’s retreat, or whatever occasion that will be enhanced by closeness and shared exhilaration. The sauna easily holds a dozen or more bathers and is a stone’s throw from the lake.
As I always do, I tested the sauna before leaving a finished project. The new owner was elated as I brought it up to temperature and explained the intricacies of sauna; after a round, we jumped in the brisk lake. It was the perfect way to end an exhausting effort and make my long haul home a relaxing one.
If you are in Western New York and looking for a unique place to stay and want a sauna experience, I recommend you check outSilverlaken!
The kiuas, or heater, is the heart of the sauna. In a wood-burner, it is commonly referred to as the sauna stove, but a wood stove it is not! There is a lot of misconception around the kiuas and how it is different from a wood stove that you might use in your house.
First, some history. The modern house stove is really a heating device designed to add comfort to your home while conforming to certain safety and smoke emission rules. Typically they are not used as primary heating appliances, unless you live in a cabin off-grid somewhere. Back in the 70s, during the energy crisis, woodstoves became popular as a way to save money. They were pretty much unregulated and varied in design from a kit that consisted of a door and a flue collar you could slap onto a used fifty-gallon drum, to a more complex Vermont Castings wood stove. Earlier stoves had little control over combustion; these evolved into airtight units that could keep a fire smoldering all night, if not for an entire season. I had one of these highly efficient stoves and didn’t let the fire go out all winter except to clean it. Cleaning the chimneys on these units is an imperative: when wood—especially if it has not been cured for two years—is burned slowly by reducing the combustion air to near nil, creosote forms. This is the result of the wood’s resinous gasses condensing on the inside of the cool chimney walls. As a result of the slow burning, these stoves emit a lot of smoke. After many houses were lost to chimney fires, safety regulations were put into place, and stoves are now required to use catalytic converters to reduce emissions, much like on your car. These regulated stoves require a religious adherence to the use of dry wood, lest your catalytic converter clog up, which they tend to do. Such stoves evolved into today’s models that use a carefully designed system of baffles and airflow to make fires burn efficiently. Now, all wood-burning home heating devices installed in the US must comply with UL (Underwriters Laboratory) safety standards and increasingly stringent EPA standards for particulate emissions. The stoves work well and are very cozy but, by design, they heat up slowly and are not meant to burn all night long not to mention all season long. Because they are intricate designs with interconnected parts, they are all cast iron. The exception is some stoves made in the pre-catalytic converter era, which were welded steel.
So, that is a wood stove. You may find a used one and think you can build a sauna around it, but the truth is, with the rare exception of one of those 70s all welded steel stoves (not the barrel ones!), you can’t. You can build a small hot room with a wood stove, but it will never be a real sauna. Here is why: A sauna stove, or kiuas, is designed to do one thing—heat sauna rocks. It is the hot rocks that heat the sauna and produce bursts of löyly steam, the essence of sauna. Early saunas did not have metal stoves. They did not even have the technology to make a metal stove, all they had was wood, earth, and rocks. The kiuas was essentially a hollowed out pile of rocks that lacked a chimney. A fire was lit within, the room filled with smoke, and after the rocks got hot, the fire was extinguished and the room cleared of smoke via vents and thereafter the rocks heated the room. The closer you can get to that smokey ideal—Savusauna experience—the better.
A sauna stove is not a wood stove; it fires hot and fast, it burns sticks not logs. Its job is to heat rocks. If fired correctly, you will never have to clean the chimney. The appropriate hot fire will combust all of the sticky wood gas and reduce creosote buildup. It is welded steel—can stand up to having water poured over it while red-hot. Cast iron cracks or explodes when subjected to this. It can take the weight of a hundred or more pounds of rocks sitting on top of it when cherry-red. Ferrous metal takes on specific colors when heated. At 1400° F, it is cherry red. At that temperature, an 1/8 inch plate of steel is as malleable as taffy on a hot summer day at the beach. I’ve repaired many sauna stoves with tops that looked like an egg carton from the stones pressing down on the hot metal. So I started making stoves (my Lämpimämpi sauna stove) with 1/2 inch thick plate at the top. I fire my stove so hot that I see dark, cherry-red glow underneath the stones. I swear that sometimes I can read a book by the glow coming off my sauna stove. If you fired your home-heating wood stove like that, you would be crazy. I like to test the limits of my stoves to know they are safe.
When you light a sauna stove, you want to fire it, that is, bring it up to temperature quickly. Use paper and dry kindling and then stuff it full of sticks, not logs (wood scraps from building saunas work great). Because sauna stoves are for intermittent use, they are exempt from the EPA particulate rules. But, the truth is once it gets going after about ten minutes, it should burn so hot that there is no smoke at all. Other than the shimmering light from the escaping heat, I can’t tell if my sauna is heating up by looking at the chimney. House wood stoves are tame devices, meant to be safe. Sauna heaters are another beast. That is why I will never install a wood-burning kiuas in a sauna in the home or attached to a house. Wood-burning saunas do burn down now and then.
If you are building your own wood-burning sauna, you may have a building inspector involved or have to get a wood-burning appliance inspection for your home insurance, and that may require a UL listing. The only heater with a UL label is the Lamppa Kuuma stove. Most others are made for the European or Canadian market, which use different standards. So, before you click on “buy” you should have a conversation with any inspectors involved. They may love the idea of a sauna, or they may think you are crazy to sit in a small hot room and throw water on a red-hot wood stove. In that case, you’ll have to convince the inspector that it’s something that’s been done millions of times without incident. In any case, you will need to make a safe installation of your kiuas. There are clearances and heat shields and floor hearths, none of which can be cheated on, unless you don’t mind owning one of the saunas that burn down. There is also combustion air to consider, which is why I like to fire mine from the outside. The sauna stove sucks up fuel and oxygen, so it’s better to not be sucking the air out of the tiny room you and your friends will be in. This is not such a problem with house wood stoves; although, it is an issue with newer air-tight construction and tiny homes.
So, before you purchase that old wood stove you find on Craigslist, do your research. Think hard about investing in a real sauna stove. The kiuas is not a wood stove. The kiuas is the heart of the sauna.
My stove pipe will get cherry red! After ten minutes, a hot fire should burn clean and smokeless.All stoves will smoke initially.Nothing bigger than your arm!This armload of ash will fire the sauna.Fill the stove and let it burn hot before closing the ash drawer.
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Looking back on recent sauna projects, I see a shifting trend in color choices made by my clients: from authentic dark-brown Viking tar to blue-grey, then brighter reds and blues and greens, and now this latest color feast. There is also a trend in current design to use more bright colors such as on the eye-popping florescent orange running shoes I saw in the gym yesterday. I have been following the designer Ingrid Fetell Lee. She writes about creating joy with color in her book The Aesthetics of Joy. She is persuasive about using more color for the simple reason that it creates joy. Although I teach color theory, I have a tendency to stick to blacks, grays, and low intensity colors in my art, a trend that I have been trying to evolve out of. Perhaps I can take some cues from my clients and take some color risks in my own work. This latest sauna project actually makes me think of late Mondrian paintings such as Broadway Boogie Woogie in which he reduced his palette to the three primary colors and sought to use color as the basis for expression.
